Economy

French Connection – famous for its “FCUK Fashion” advertising campaign – is the latest UK retailer to run into trouble as the retail apocalypse unfolds: “Shares in struggling fashion chain French Connection have risen 25% to 55p after it said it may be up for sale. “Following speculation at the …

Further evidence that all is not well with the UK economy emerged with the release of the September new car sales figures. These were more than 20 percent down on 2017. The primary reason for the fall – the one latched onto by most mainstream media outlets – is the …

Britain’s hard pressed High Street retailers will find cold comfort in Chancellor Philip Hammond’s proposal to address the disparity with online retailers. This is because Hammond has offered the typical politician’s response – increased taxes – to a problem that has a very different cause to the one Hammond presupposes. …

Despite the cheerleading efforts of the legacy media, the economic storm clouds are growing on the horizon. Oil – the economic “master resource” – passed $80 per barrel yesterday. Meanwhile, central banks around the world have begun to unwind the stimulus packages used to bail out the economy in the …

Forget Brexit, never mind the retail apocalypse, the UK economy has finally delivered the positive news that everyone has been waiting for. That, at least, is the message from a legacy media largely reduced to rewriting corporate press releases… In this case, the headline release from the Office for National …

In the modern world, mainstream economic journalists have just two roles to perform – to convince the public that they have some clue about what is going on; and to maintain public confidence at all costs. So it was, for example, that even as Lehman Brothers was collapsing a decade …

Equating money with wealth is among the most dangerous delusions currently afflicting humanity. This is, perhaps, understandable given that so few people now have access to money in the quantities needed to improve their lives. Government, meanwhile, effectively lies when it points to the various pots of money that it …

Have you noticed that children are looking scruffier these days? You may, perhaps, have kept this observation to yourself. After all, kids are supposed to run around getting dirty, right? But your first impression turns out to be correct. Children are a lot dirtier and a lot smellier than they …

Upmarket restaurant chains Gaucho and Cau have become the latest victims of Britain’s retail apocalypse after their management was unable to find a way out from under a mountain of debt and complex legal structures, according to the BBC. What is notable about the failure of these restaurants is that …

Volume one of Das Kapital was the final work produced by Karl Marx. Volumes two and three were completed by Friedrich Engels from Marx’s notes. According to the Grundrisse – literally the “blueprint” – Marx had intended to produce ten volumes that would describe how the industrial economy worked. The …